Hero to zero: the decline of the world’s biggest mobile phone brand

A decade ago, Nokia was Finland’s finest export business. What began as a lumber company more than a century earlier was the biggest mobile phone brand on the planet with a 40pc market share.

And then the iPhone happened and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer famously laughed off the Apple device because it had one button.

Within a few years, Microsoft was backpedalling and fixed upon the bold idea of buying Nokia for $7.2bn in 2013 when Nokia itself was almost bankrupt.

However, the investment didn’t work out for Microsoft and it emerged that the software giant announced impairment charges of $7.6bn and announced 7,800 in job cuts in its smartphone group as part of a corporate restructure involving 18,000 job losses.

In May, it emerged that Microsoft added a further $1bn to the write-off and announced 1,850 more layoffs with 1,350 of those layoffs happening within the former Nokia divisions it acquired.